The statue shows Darwin as a student at Christ's, before he set off on his voyage around the world on the Beagle.

Three years have been spent restoring Darwin's rooms to their early nineteenth-century appearance. They will now be opened to the public for the first time since 1909.

Among other details, the curtains are period-accurate. To choose the furniture, the researchers looked at Darwin's private letters. They also consulted etchings of student life by novelist-to-be William Makepeace Thackeray, a contemporary of Darwin's at Cambridge.

Microscopic paint samples traced to Darwin's time revealed the original colour scheme: green earth paint for the oak panels, with a brightly-coloured and gilded frieze near the ceiling.

These cushions on the two bay windows turned out to have four covers inside, each one dating back to a different era. The oldest, a blue and beige print on cotton fabric, was dated to Darwin's time at the college in the late 1820s.

This allowed the researchers to recreate soft furnishings as they would have appeared to the young naturalist, including the period curtains and a wool carpet in production in 1828.

We know that Darwin kept his beetle collection when he was at Cambridge.

Other items he is known to have kept in his room include a double-barrelled percussion gun, playing cards (middle left), bird skins (bottom), a Gould-type microscope (top-right), and his dog Sappho.